Aaron Judge, the star hitter for the New York Yankees, has been out of the lineup since the first week of June as he recovers from a stress fracture to one of his ribs. His timeline for return has major implications for the Yankees’ postseason hopes this year, so it is naturally the subject of endless scrutiny from sports media in New York City and beyond.
If only we knew as much about the medical status of our elected officials. Judge, despite his name, does not wield any official power on the American people’s behalf. Those who do are increasingly aged, infirm, and secretive about their health. Congress has been greatly weakened as an institution and a branch of government over the past few decades. Now it is increasingly diminished in a physical sense, as well.
Five lawmakers have now died in office in this current Congress, with the latest being South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who suffered from an aortic dissection earlier this month. A handful of others have gone missing for extended periods of time as they deal with serious medical events. Even more of them are visibly declining, with multiple lawmakers stepping down or retiring after their physical and mental impairments became impossible to ignore.
There is no shortage of reforms that Congress could enact to strengthen itself. Perhaps the most useful one for the public would be to take a page from professional sports and create a congressional injury report. Baseball, basketball, and football teams are required by their leagues to publicly list when and why players are unable to compete at regular intervals. The nation’s legislature should do the same thing.
The U.S. government is no stranger to covering up serious illnesses and incapacities. After suffering a stroke during his second term, President Woodrow Wilson was increasingly reliant on his wife, Edith, to carry out basic tasks for the last two years of his presidency. For a time, she even served as the sole conduit of communications between Wilson and his Cabinet. Congress and the states later ratified the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to provide mechanisms to remedy the possibility of presidential incapacity.
There is no mechanism to remove a Supreme Court justice other than impeachment. On at least one occasion, however, the justices have effectively stripped a colleague of power. Justice William O. Douglas suffered a major stroke on New Year’s Eve in 1974 that seriously damaged his memory and cognitive abilities. He refused to resign, however, because he held out hope that his replacement would be appointed by a Democratic president after the 1976 election.
While the public knew of the stroke and newspapers reported rumors about his mental condition, Douglas publicly insisted that he was capable of staying on the court. Only in 1979, with the publication of Bob Woodward’s book The Brethren, did Americans learn the extent of his incapacity at the time. Douglas’s condition was so severe, Woodward reported, that the other justices secretly agreed to punt cases in which he cast the deciding vote to the following term—an ad hoc way of stripping him of his power until he finally announced his retirement in November 1975.
But what was once a rare occurrence among public officials is now an increasingly visible problem. Both President Donald Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, have faced considerable scrutiny over their declining mental faculties and overall health. Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race that summer after a disastrous presidential debate where the once-eloquent statesman struggled to speak clearly. Trump’s own decline speaks for itself.
The federal courts have wrestled with it, as well: Earlier this month, the Supreme Court turned down an appeal from Judge Pauline Newman, a 99-year-old jurist who has been suspended from her duties since 2023 by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals over her alleged mental deterioration. Newman vociferously denies the allegations and produced testimony from physicians that asserted her faculties are still intact.
But it is Congress where this problem is most apparent—and most easily remedied. Members of Congress are more visible than any other public official save for the president, with reporters able to observe and interact with them often in the halls of the Capitol. The grueling schedule of public events and fundraisers, especially in an election year, also theoretically makes it harder for them to hide for extended periods of time.
That does not stop members of Congress from trying their best to escape public scrutiny. Last week, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell posted a photo with a copy of that day’s newspaper after six weeks of absence from the public eye while he was hospitalized for an undisclosed medical condition after a fall. (McConnell said in a statement that it was pneumonia.) His absence, as well as the silence surrounding it, led to intense speculation on social media about whether he was even alive and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear taking the unusual step of publicly requesting an update on his health. (This week, Beshear told Katie Couric that he’d received credible intelligence that McConnell had, in fact, passed away.)
One can hardly blame the public for its interest in the lives and livelihoods of its elected public servants. The former Senate majority leader has been increasingly frail over the last few years, including two troubling episodes where he stopped speaking mid–press conference and began staring into the middle distance before aides escorted him away. His health status also had electoral implications—the deadline to appoint a replacement is next month—and political ones with a narrowly divided Senate.
In recent years, members of Congress also have been part of a growing trend in which they simply go missing for long periods of time. In 2024, Texas Representative Kay Granger quietly stopped showing up to Capitol Hill and cast her final vote in July of that year. Shortly thereafter, the 81-year-old legislator moved into an assisted-living facility in Fort Worth for the final six months of her term because she was suffering from dementia. Granger’s constituents did not know her fate until The Dallas Morning News tracked her down that December.
Earlier this year, New Jersey Representative Tom Kean Jr. also vanished from Congress in March without a public explanation. Unlike Granger at the time, Kean is running for reelection, making his absence from both the House floor and campaign events even more noticeable. After intense public scrutiny and multiple efforts to locate him, the 57-year-old Republican returned to Capitol Hill in June and revealed that he had been hospitalized for depression.
“When I first informed the public that I was dealing with a medical issue, I was still trying to understand what was happening myself,” Kean said in a speech on the House floor. “When I said I hoped to return in a matter of weeks, I believed it. Those were the best estimates the doctors could provide. But, as the over 48 million of my fellow Americans being treated for this illness have come to discover, there is no timeline for healing. There is no timeline for recovery. Only the work of getting better one day at a time.”
It is rare to hear public figures, and especially elected officials, discuss their struggles with depression and similar mental illnesses. Kean deserves credit for his honesty about his condition. At the same time, it is democratically untenable for the people’s elected representatives to vanish without a trace from their jobs without explanation or consequence. In no other profession or vocation in the country would it be allowed.
This problem won’t be going away on its own. The 119th Congress was the third-oldest in the legislative branch’s history when it was sworn in in 2025, according to an NBC News analysis, behind only the Congresses that began in 2017 and 2021. Part of this stems from increases in American life expectancy over the last 250 years. The average age of the First Congress in 1789 was a mere 42 years old. But it also reflects the unwillingness of longtime lawmakers to step aside when they are no longer completely able to carry out the job to which they were elected.
Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, whose physical and mental decline was apparent in recent years, announced in January she would retire at the end of her current term after intense public pressure. She had originally planned to run for reelection this year at the age of 88. California Senator Dianne Feinstein was once a formidable presence on the Senate’s Judiciary and Intelligence committees. In her final years, however, she became wheelchair-bound and increasingly confused about where she was and what she was doing, only retiring in 2023.
The Constitution sets the qualifications for members of Congress. It grants life tenure to federal judges and has set a two-term limit for presidents. But there is no legal or constitutional restriction on how many times a lawmaker may serve in that position. Michigan’s John Dingell, who served for six decades, holds the record for longest-tenured lawmaker. Imposing term limits or age limits on federal lawmakers is a perennial issue, but there is no viable pathway to enacting either reform. In 1995, the Supreme Court struck down more than two dozen state laws that restricted candidates from appearing on the ballot if they had already served a certain number of terms. States, the high court reasoned, could not impose additional restrictions on federal election candidates beyond what the Constitution required.
Congress, unsurprisingly, has shown little interest in ratifying a constitutional amendment that would limit its power. As a result, Americans are left with legislators who are increasingly aged and infirm. For now, the best that we can hope for is regular updates on their health status, the reason for any extended absence, and the expected timeline for their return to duty—though the fact that so many high-profile lawmakers have essentially flouted their obligation to keep their constituents informed about whether they’re medically fit for duty suggests that those hopes should not be high.
Fortunately, Congress already has something akin to an in-house doctor. In 1928, the House formally requested that the Navy provide a medical officer to Congress and created the Office of the Attending Physician, or OAP. Lawmakers and Supreme Court justices can receive primary care from the attending physician’s medical staff on a regular basis at a heavily discounted price. The OAP also provides members with vaccinations, first aid, and other urgent-care needs.
Medical privacy laws like HIPAA prevent hospitals, doctors, and other health care providers from simply telling reporters what is wrong with public officials. A lawmaker’s own staff also has no independent duty to provide updates on its boss’s medical condition, and plenty of reasons to keep it quiet on their behalf—or even its own. Rumors have long haunted certain elderly former lawmakers about the influence of top staffers over their decision-making.
Fortunately, our nation’s sports leagues have already provided us with a blueprint for what should be done. Congress could pass a law that allows the OAP to independently verify a lawmaker’s medical status once per week and report it to the public on a regular basis. In professional sports, injury lists do not require full disclosure of every medical condition that an athlete suffers from. But it does require teams to explain why an athlete isn’t playing, what the injury is, and when they will be expected to return.
This can be a relatively modest reform on lawmakers’ part if they wish. I doubt members of Congress would wish to submit to regular cognitive screenings, for example, even though the president of the United States seems to enjoy taking them as often as he can. They should also not be required to disclose every aspect of their medical history to the public as a condition of taking office. Lawmakers need not give up medical privacy altogether.
Nor should the attending physician have the power to suspend or remove a lawmaker in any way. Congress itself does have the power to remove lawmakers if they are permanently incapacitated. In 1981, the House declared Maryland Representative Gladys Spellman’s seat vacant after she fell into an irreversible coma from a heart attack. Thankfully, her tragic situation has been a unique occurrence in modern American history. But with an increasingly aged legislature, it may only be a matter of time before it happens again. And in our increasingly distrustful and conspiratorial age, it would be helpful to have an independent physician who can provide a brief, frank assessment of an impaired lawmaker’s condition if and when it does.
When a member of Congress doesn’t show up to work for at least a week or disappears for undisclosed medical reasons, the public—and their constituents in particular—should receive some kind of mandatory explanation about what’s happening. If our legislative branch is going to strengthen itself as an institution once more, it should start with a modified version of that ancient maxim: Congress, heal thyself.
